Delicious 30-minute Vegetarian Meatballs

Here they are! The meatballs of the hour – that are, actually, not meatballs.

Because they are VEGETARIAN MEATBALLS! Made without beans (we’re going rogue!) and made instead with cauliflower and brown rice and quinoa.

The breakdown is that they’re made with cauliflower, brown rice, quinoa, oat flour, eggs, and a nice big pinch of garlic and spices. And they don’t require hours of prep. That’s it! It’s just simple, straightforward, SUPER YUM plant-based goodness in the form of vegetarian meatballs made weeknight-dinner-friendly, because real food that matches real life is where it’s at.

There are a few things that I think we can all approve of with these vegetarian meatballs:

• INGREDIENTS: Basic, whole, wonderful –> Cauliflower // Brown Rice // Quinoa // Garlic // Spices // Eggs // Oat Flour (which is nothing more than just old fashioned oats crushed in your food processor or blender). Also – no beans. Which is kind of nice, right? since a lot of vegetarian meatballs are bean-heavy. All hail the versatility of cauliflower!
• TIMING: 30 minutes. The cauliflower is not high maintenance here. Just a quick simmer in some hot water to soften it up, and then as a bonus on being speedy, you can use those amazingly convenient garlic brown rice quinoa packages from Seeds of Change that you buy en masse at Costco – you know the ones, right? – and then your cauli and your rice and everything else gets pulsed around in our favorite appliance of all time THE FOOD PROCESSOR in order to make the mixture. If you can enlist the help of a few vegetarian meatball rollers (this is why people have children, right?), you will have vegetarian meatball dinner on the table AND vegetarian meatball stockpile built up in your fridge in no time.
• ADAPTABILITY: Cook once, eat many times. This recipe makes a million and a half meatless meatballs which means that you can use them with many different sauces in many different recipes for years to come. Er, no. Not years. But seriously – you will have a TON of meatballs with this recipe, so start brainstorming serving and/or sauce ideas.

•  Prep Time: 15 mins
•  Cook Time: 15 mins
•  Yield: 50+ meatballs (so, like, 10 or more servings)

• I used Seeds of Change pre-cooked garlic brown rice and quinoa for this recipe (2 packets = about 3 cups). Since this has garlic flavor already in the mix, if you are using your own pre-cooked quinoa and/or brown rice, make sure to add some minced garlic or garlic powder.
• If the mixture doesn’t stick together in a ball when gently pressed, add about 1/3 of the mixture back into the food processor and pulse until it’s more the consistency of hummus. That should help it hold together. If that still isn’t enough, just add a little more of your “dry ingredient” till you get a consistency that you can gently roll between your hands to form ball shapes.
• Nutrition facts are for 1/12th of this recipe, so just take your total # of meatballs and divide them into 12 servings – the exact number of meatballs per serving depends on how big you make the meatballs.

Source: pinchofyum.com